NBCUniversal Unveils New TV Targeting Offering

Marketers these days are able to target their desired consumer very easily online, but TV is often a different story.

On Thursday, NBCUniversal unveiled their proposed fix, which the Comcast-owned network is calling Audience Targeting Platform. The service will collect information from set-top boxes and other data sets in order to give media buyers a better clue into which NBCU shows their desired audiences are watching.

NBCU will use the service to highlight to marketers its most high-value inventory, or about a third of their TV offering, according to Linda Yaccarino, chairman of advertising sales and client partnerships. Shows with small audiences can often go under the radar among marketers when they actually carry a sought-after audience.

"We're going to get a lot of scratch-your-head, 'gee whiz' [marketers] that say, 'I didn't realize wrestling worked that hard for our consumer. I'm going to need more of that," Ms. Yaccarino said as an example.

NBCU will pool together a variety of data sources to make its secret sauce. For instance, NBCU will use data from movie ticket company Fandango, which is also owned by Comcast.

As it stands, marketers can target, say, young men, but sometimes what they really want is young men with certain buying habits or personality traits. With this new product, NBCU says it can tell marketers when a certain show's audience includes this group.

Ad buyers say marketers already use services like these on their own. In fact, a crop of companies have emerged to help let marketers and networks apply "Big Data" to television to find niche viewers, a practice well entrenched in the world of Web advertising. As it stands, ads in the $70-billion TV ad market are still bought and sold based on typical age and gender demographics as measured by Nielsen.

The service likely won't affect big-ticket shows like "The Voice," but rather smaller shows. NBCU's offering would allow the network to charge more for cheap pockets of inventory that marketers are finding via these technologies.

"It's a very smart way to provide more value and prove more value and try to up-charge on certain inventory," said Jason Kanefsky, executive vice president of strategic investments at media buyer Havas Media.

Smaller advertisers without the resources to use lots of data-targeting services will benefit from NBCU's new offering, Mr. Kanefsky said, while larger buyers have more or less been using data options that already exist in the marketplace.

NBCU's announcement comes as the industry begins preparing for the annual upfront market this spring, where networks pitch their seasons to advertisers. In 2014, that overall market proved weak, as media buyers held back dollars and in some cases moved money to newer digital channels. For its part, though, NBC bucked the trend and performed above-average in the upfronts thanks to a ratings boost after a years-long slump.

CORRECTION: NBCUniversal is the entity that will run the service. An earlier version of this post said it was NBC in two instances.